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Monday, 15 July 2013

Global climate change politics: an inconvenient truth

Polar bears. Bloody whingers.

On Sunday,
Greens Leader Christine Milne called it on the ABC’s Insiders program: “In all
this discussion about changing to a flexible price, no-one is talking about the
impacts on the climate.” And she’s right.

Turnbull said, “Climate change is the ultimate long-term
problem. We have to make decisions today, bear costs today so that adverse
consequences are avoided, dangerous consequences are avoided many decades into
the future…”

That was three years ago.
Australia was still reeling from the Black Saturday bushfires, where a record
number of people lost their lives in a raging inferno that followed a
two-month, unprecedented heatwave. In 2011, Japan shuddered from the fifth most
powerful earthquake in Earth’s history, Christchurch also crumbled, and
Queensland and Victoria were inundated with floods. Climate change seemed
palpable. It was happening all around us and even as skeptics brushed them off
as cyclical events, we shifted uneasily in our seats and wanted something to be
done.

Now, America is feeling
that same sense of urgency. As Obama said in his speech,
the country has had its hottest year on record, the artic ice cap is melting to
record levels and extreme weather events have cost the country millions.

But in Australia, we’ve
become complacent. Victoria has a desalination plant that the Naphine
Government has said we won’t need to draw from until at least 2016, because
our dams are up to 74 per cent capacity. We whinge about the plant’s cost,
forgetting how recently we would anxiously eye the ‘water storage’ calculator
on billboards, watching levels plummet to below 35 per cent.

Do we even remember why we have a
carbon tax/price in the first place?

Let’s recap. In 2006, Al
Gore presented one of the most powerful PowerPoint presentations of all time in
the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Suddenly, work that scientists had been quietly toiling away at for years
became of interest to the mainstream. It was compelling stuff. We watched as
the graphs soared into unchartered territory and we emerged alarmed and afraid
of what we were doing to the Earth.

“DO SOMETHING!” the masses
screamed. And governments did. Well, they started to. The British government
released the Stern
Review in October 2006, outlining the effect of climate change on the
world’s economy. In Australia, John Howard kicked things off in 2007 by laying
the groundwork needed to set up an emissions trading scheme, as recommended by
the Shergold emissions trading task group.Before the 2007 election,
Kevin Rudd declared, “Climate change is the greatest moral, economic and social
challenge of our time.” He was voted in, and then no sooner was the ink dry on
his signature to the Kyoto Protocol; he suddenly lost his mojo for the environment that
had been so convincing earlier. A new kid had come on stage – the GFC. The
message shifted to bugger the planet; we need to get people out buying plasmas
again. So the planned Emissions Trading
Scheme that had been worked on for years, and which Malcolm Turnbull had fallen
on his sword for in lending bipartisan support to get through, was suddenly off
the table in 2010. The greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our
time could wait another few years (until 2013) said Rudd.

Back then, Rudd’s
capitulation on climate change marked a turning point for him in the polls, and
soon, the faceless men came for him, quickly installing Gillard, who went into
the 2010 election declaring a carbon tax a “never-ever” under her Government.
But we know how that turned out, and in fairness, a hung parliament wasn’t on
the radar when she said it.

Gillard created a
Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, comprising members of the rag-tag
Parliament to prepare a report on ways to introduce a carbon price. The result
was the Carbon Pricing Scheme introduced on 1 July 2012, which required big
emitters to purchase carbon emissions permits at a fixed price for the first
two years, after which time the number of available permits would be capped and
the price floated in line with an emissions trading scheme. As Milne told Barrie Cassidy on Insiders, the current scheme has been vilified as a ‘tax’,
“…when in fact what we legislated was an emissions trading scheme with a fixed
price period.” But don't let that get in the way of a good Coalition slogan eh? #bigfatcarbontax

It was part of the Clean
Energy Future Plan, which provides investment in clean technologies,
support for manufacturers and farmers to reduce their environmental impact, and
help for households and businesses to reduce energy consumption and switch to
cleaner sources. And it’s working. Just one year in, the
Clean Energy Future Report notes that carbon pollution from electricity is
down 7.4%, primarily because we’re switching to cleaner sources. The report
states: “…renewable energy output increased by almost 30% and the output from
the seven most highly-polluting coal generators was down 14% from the same
period in 2011-12.”

That’s a pretty good
result, huh? So why aren’t we hearing more about this? Rudd has announced he’ll
scrap the second fixed-price year and move straight to the floating price. This
means it will cost a lot less for big emitters to pollute, just as their emitting
behavior was starting to change.Tony Abbott’s been
imploring me to read his Real Solutions Plan, so I had a flick through to find out what his vision
is for the climate. In 50 pages, ‘climate’ is mentioned once. The ‘Real
Solution’ outlined is to shut down the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance
Corporation (CEFC), established by the Gillard Government to invest in businesses
trying to get innovative clean energy proposals off the ground. He’ll also suspend the operations of the Clean
Energy Finance Corporation (no need for a regulator if you’re not collecting
the carbon tax anymore).The (other) Real
Solution is to implement the Direct Action Plan on climate change and carbon
emissions. But there’s no detail about that whatsoever in the Real
Solutions Plan, so I Googled and eventually found it on Greg
Hunt’s website. Not the Coalition’s website mind you, but I digress. The plan has
slightly curled leaves on the front page, which seems like a good omen, but in
actual fact, the leaves represent the entire plan. Yes, that’s right! The
Direct Action Plan is to plant 20 million trees to suck up all the extra carbon
being emitted into the atmosphere! Well, that, a few incentives for old and
dirty businesses to clean up their act. No sticks here, just leaves and
carrots. Oh, and here’s the kicker.
Abbott will scrap the carbon tax but keep the compensation to households (so will Rudd). Bills
will go down. Power usage will go up and the compo cheque’s in the mail so you can go ahead and buy that third plasma TV. Direct Action to not change behaviour. Brilliant work, Tones!
No wonder Turnbull said the policy was bullshit.

We’ve lost sense of
what action on climate change is all about. As Obama repositions the debate
from parochial concerns about jobs and rallies Americans to lead the world on
creating a greener planet and industries, the political leaders of Australia
appeal to our hip pockets, and back away from the hard decisions that are
needed to transition industry and attitudes, work once deemed so important.

1 comment:

Good points well made. The climate conversation in this country has gone out the window and both parties seem intent on keeping the carbon compo regardless of the fact that lowering the price means less oncost. A joke.